The Leaky Science of Hollywood
The Movie Life Story of Stephen Hawking Is Not Very Scientific
It would be nice if producers of science films spent half as much time on getting the science right as they do on, say, ward-robes or hair-styles.
Some are tired of complaining about this, but we are in an extraordinary run of such movies right now, and some would love to see one that doesn’t make one gnash one's teeth.
Last year, “Gravity,” which won seven Oscars, delivered amazingly realistic depictions of space hardware and weightlessness, but bungled the simple rules of orbital mechanics.
Next week will bring us not one but two movies with black holes at their core:
“The Theory of Everything,” about the early life and times of Stephen Hawking, the Oxford-born, Oxford-educated physicist and best-selling author; and “Interstellar,” directed and written by the Nolan brothers, Christopher and Jonathan, about astronauts traveling through a wormhole to find a new home for humanity.
Intriguingly, it is based on work by one of Hawking’s oldest buddies, Kip Thorne of the California Institute of Technology.
Next week will bring us not one but two movies with black holes at their core:
“The Theory of Everything,” about the early life and times of Stephen Hawking, the Oxford-born, Oxford-educated physicist and best-selling author; and “Interstellar,” directed and written by the Nolan brothers, Christopher and Jonathan, about astronauts traveling through a wormhole to find a new home for humanity.
Intriguingly, it is based on work by one of Hawking’s oldest buddies, Kip Thorne of the California Institute of Technology.
The Academy Award-winning director James Marsh discusses his newest project, “The Theory of Everything,” which chronicles the life of the cosmologist Stephen Hawking.
Video by Carrie Halperin on Publish Date October 27, 2014. Photo by Liam Daniel/Focus Features.
“The Theory of Everything” has a lot going for it.
Eddie Redmayne is justly being promoted for an Oscar nomination for his uncanny portrayal of Hawking and the relentless wasting effects of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a.k.a. Lou Gehrig’s disease, for which any number of celebrities have lately endured an orgy of ice-bucket drenchings.
Eddie Redmayne is justly being promoted for an Oscar nomination for his uncanny portrayal of Hawking and the relentless wasting effects of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a.k.a. Lou Gehrig’s disease, for which any number of celebrities have lately endured an orgy of ice-bucket drenchings.
Millions of people and science fans who have read Hawking’s book, flocked to his lectures and watched him on “The Simpsons,” “Star Trek” and “The Big Bang Theory” have never known him except as a wheel-chaired figure speaking in a robotic voice.
For all they know Hawking was always that way and floated down to Earth on a comet, like Venus drifting in on a half-shell.
For all they know Hawking was always that way and floated down to Earth on a comet, like Venus drifting in on a half-shell.
Redmayne’s performance — from the gnarled, paralyzed fingers to the mischievous spark that lights an otherwise frozen face as he savours a joke or a bon mot — is spot on.
One dramatic high point, when he clicks a mouse and the words
“My name is Stephen Hawking”
come out of a speaker with a robotic American accent, is a genuine creation moment.
Another, and my favourite, when he types, for no purpose
DAISY DAISY GIVE ME YOUR ANSWER DO.
There were tears in someone's eyes.
One dramatic high point, when he clicks a mouse and the words
“My name is Stephen Hawking”
come out of a speaker with a robotic American accent, is a genuine creation moment.
Another, and my favourite, when he types, for no purpose
DAISY DAISY GIVE ME YOUR ANSWER DO.
There were tears in someone's eyes.
But the movie doesn’t deserve any prizes for its drive-by muddling of Hawking’s scientific work, leaving viewers in the dark about exactly why Hawking is so famous.
Instead of showing how Hawking undermined traditional notions of space and time, it panders to religious sensibilities about what his work does or does not say about the existence of God, which in fact is very little.
Instead of showing how Hawking undermined traditional notions of space and time, it panders to religious sensibilities about what his work does or does not say about the existence of God, which in fact is very little.
To its credit, the film does not shy away from the darker parts of Hawking’s story.
It is based on the memoir “Traveling to Infinity: My Life With Stephen,” by his first wife, Jane Wilde — one of two books she has written about what it was like to fall in love with and then care for an increasingly disabled and celebrated genius.
Jane Wilde eventually takes up with the choir-master at her church.
Stephen wheels away with his nurse Elaine Mason, whom he subsequently married and then divorced.
It is based on the memoir “Traveling to Infinity: My Life With Stephen,” by his first wife, Jane Wilde — one of two books she has written about what it was like to fall in love with and then care for an increasingly disabled and celebrated genius.
Jane Wilde eventually takes up with the choir-master at her church.
Stephen wheels away with his nurse Elaine Mason, whom he subsequently married and then divorced.
Hawking is said to have signed off, if reluctantly, on a film that would fill in the personal side of his life.
Of all the courageous things he has done, this might have been the bravest: entrusting his life story to an ex-wife.
Hawking allowed the producers to use actual recordings of his iconic voice, and after seeing the film he pronounced it “broadly true,” according to the director, James Marsh, who won an Oscar for the 2008 documentary “Man on Wire.”
The implicature of 'broadly true' is perhaps Griceian.
(Cfr. Strawson on 'narrow truth').
The implicature of 'broadly true' is perhaps Griceian.
(Cfr. Strawson on 'narrow truth').
But when it came to science, some couldn’t help gnashing one's teeth after all.
Forget for a moment that early in the story the characters are sitting in a seminar in London talking about black holes, the bottom-less gravitational abysses from which not even light can escape,
YEARS BEFORE that term had been coined.
If that's not a neo-logism avant-la-lettre I don't know what is.
Sadly, a few anachronisms are probably inevitable in a popular account of such an arcane field as astro-physics -- or astrology for that matter.
Forget for a moment that early in the story the characters are sitting in a seminar in London talking about black holes, the bottom-less gravitational abysses from which not even light can escape,
YEARS BEFORE that term had been coined.
If that's not a neo-logism avant-la-lettre I don't know what is.
Sadly, a few anachronisms are probably inevitable in a popular account of such an arcane field as astro-physics -- or astrology for that matter.
It gets worse, though.
Skip a few scenes and years ahead.
Hawking, getting ready for bed, is staring at glowing coals in the fire-place and has a vision of black holes fizzing and leaking heat.
Skip a few scenes and years ahead.
Hawking, getting ready for bed, is staring at glowing coals in the fire-place and has a vision of black holes fizzing and leaking heat.
The next thing we know Hawking is telling an audience in an Oxford lecture hall that black holes, contrary to legend and previous theory, and unlike diamonds, as the myth goes, are not forever, but will leak particles, shrink and eventually explode, before a crank moderator declares the session over, calling the notion “rubbish.”
The prediction of Hawking's radiation, as it is called, is his greatest achievement, the one he is most likely to get a Nobel Prize for.
But it did NOT happen with a moment of inspiration staring at a fire-place.
And in telling the story this way, the producers have cheated themselves out of what was arguably the most dramatic moment in his scientific career.
But it did NOT happen with a moment of inspiration staring at a fire-place.
And in telling the story this way, the producers have cheated themselves out of what was arguably the most dramatic moment in his scientific career.
Hawking had been goaded by work by Alexei Starobinsky in Moscow and Jacob Bekenstein in Princeton into trying to determine the properties of micro-scopic black holes.
That required a daunting calculation that would combine quantum theory with Einsteinian gravity, twin poles of theoretical physics thought until then to be mathematically incompatible.
That required a daunting calculation that would combine quantum theory with Einsteinian gravity, twin poles of theoretical physics thought until then to be mathematically incompatible.
It took months, during which his friends and colleagues were sure Hawking would fail -- even if we can't say they KNEW he would fail, because they did not.
They propped quantum text-books open in front of him and then went away, wondering what if anything would come of him.
They propped quantum text-books open in front of him and then went away, wondering what if anything would come of him.
When Hawking discovered that quantum effects would make black holes leaky, it went against all his intuition and expectations.
He spent a couple of lonely months trying to figure out where he had gone wrong, at one point locking himself in a bathroom to think.
The penumbra of uncertainty and randomness with which quantum theory endowed nature on the smallest scales would in effect pierce the black hole’s previously inviolable surface.
His discovery has turned out to be a big, big deal, because it implies, among other things, that three-dimensional space is an illusion.
Do we live in a hologram, like the picture on a credit card? Or the Matrix?
He spent a couple of lonely months trying to figure out where he had gone wrong, at one point locking himself in a bathroom to think.
The penumbra of uncertainty and randomness with which quantum theory endowed nature on the smallest scales would in effect pierce the black hole’s previously inviolable surface.
His discovery has turned out to be a big, big deal, because it implies, among other things, that three-dimensional space is an illusion.
Do we live in a hologram, like the picture on a credit card? Or the Matrix?
None of this, alas, is in the film.
That is more than bad history.
The equations on the blackboard appear to be authentic — the movies are always great at getting the design details right — but as usual it misses the big picture, the zig-zaggy path of collaboration, competition and even combat by which science actually progresses.
By leaving out people like Bekenstein and Starobinsky, the movie reinforces the stereotype of the lone genius already ingrained by the media and the Nobel Prizes.
That is more than bad history.
The equations on the blackboard appear to be authentic — the movies are always great at getting the design details right — but as usual it misses the big picture, the zig-zaggy path of collaboration, competition and even combat by which science actually progresses.
By leaving out people like Bekenstein and Starobinsky, the movie reinforces the stereotype of the lone genius already ingrained by the media and the Nobel Prizes.
In Hawking’s case the stereotype is compounded by his disability, which causes the rest of the world — especially the media — to regard his every statement as if it came from the Delphic oracle.
It also devalues Hawking’s own work, the months of intense calculation that are required to turn inspiration into a real theory, by making it look easy.
Science ain't easy, even for the Einsteins among us, which doesn’t mean it ain't fun, either.
“The Theory of Everything” is only a film, and some should be thrilled that Hawking is at last getting his due from the star-making machinery of the big screen and that black holes are even part of the cultural discourse.
And we are.
It is, as Hawking said, “broadly true.”
And we are.
It is, as Hawking said, “broadly true.”
But at the risk of coming off as a cranky nerd, some wish the moviemakers had been able to hew to a higher authority.
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